Part 1
The public health and the private medicine are supposed to work together to sever the public and improve the health outcomes of individuals. However, in America, the relationship between these two sectors is extremely combative. This is due to the fact that although both of them may have the same motive, the approach used to achieve their goals is different. For instance, most private practices have medical equipment that are not available in the public health facilities. There for medical services requiring such equipment, a private practice would be best for an individual (Gonzalez, 2004).
Though the public healthcare facilities are affordable to a majority of Americans, the care offered in most of these hospitals is not of quality standard. This is mainly caused by issues such as inadequate resource allocation. Moreover, the public sector is characterized by poor working conditions and outdated and dysfunctional equipment. Therefore, for the majority of public health facilities, patient care is regarded as poor with most of the staff being unresponsive mainly due to poor pay and hence lack of satisfaction with their work conditions. These are the factors that prompt most of the public health employees to work as part time personnel in private practices. This is also associated with utilization of public resources for private purposes (Gonzalez, 2004). In addition, some public health doctors refer most patients to their own private practice clinics for benefits. Though private practice has been labelled a key contributor to the healthcare system, it is also important to note that private practices operate as businesses. Therefore, though these two sectors are supposed to work together, there is a certain high level of mistrust between the two and as a result of this contentious relationship, the public suffers.
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Part II
Issues involving medical mistakes have become very important in current healthcare policy discussions of in the United States. It’s a surprising fact that medical errors are labelled as the third leading cause of death as well as disability in the united states, after heart disease and cancer. This is according to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999. Studies have established that nearly half a million people in the united states die annually as a result of medical mistakes. A death resulting from a medical mistake could result from various factors such as; erroneous medical judgement, inadequately skilled staff or an adverse effect that is preventable. Though the healthcare system is designed reduce mortality rates in the society, it is ironical that a majority of individuals die in the very same hands of medical professionals. According to the IOM report, majority of these errors are not due to poor performances by individual healthcare providers; but rather, most of them are associated with systematic issues in the healthcare system delivery (The Lancet, 2011).
Since the issue has been in the hands of medical experts for the longest period of time without any improvement, continuing to trust the healthcare providers will not only intensify it, but also deteriorate the healthcare system. Hence, considering the fact that issue has been escalating over the years, the United States Federal Government should an initiative by taking certain necessary steps which should help it to continuously monitor the situation. For instance, institution of mandatory reporting of medical errors can greatly improve healthcare quality. This kind of regulation has been operation is some states (The Lancet, 2011). For example, since 1985, the States Department of Health of New York called for all hospitals in the state to report to it all medical errors (notwithstanding whether they caused death or not). This is evidence that if the Federal government took responsibility by putting such strict regulations, there would be a decrease in the rate at which medical errors affect cause death and disability. There is however criticism regarding this and some critics have claimed that states with these kind of regulations have not recorded fewer medical errors or greater safety.
Part III
The three main components of healthcare system are accessibility, affordability and quality. These components are basically the primary concern of most healthcare systems, and they operate in a complex and a dynamic relationship that has been labelled as interlocking. However, in the recent past, the healthcare system has been deviating from these three components where there have been issues of rising healthcare costs, reduced quality and lack of accessibility of health care facilities. An interesting fact to note is that these three components cannot be improved at the same time, and when legislation focuses on improving one of these components, the other two becomes worse. This has been attributed to limited resources. For example, by reducing the healthcare costs to make it affordable to all, i.e. Improving affordability, quality of healthcare decreases, as well as accessibility. Moreover, improved quality is consequently associated with increased cost and reduced accessibility. Increased accessibility on the other hand will also lead to increased healthcare costs as well as reduced quality (Niles, 2015). Therefore, improvement in all three components is difficult, if not impossible.
Though healthcare system in the United States has been heavily regulated through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there is still much that needs to be done. The major goal of ACA is to ensure that private insurance makes it easy for individuals to get access to quality healthcare and affordable costs. Achieving this is however a difficult task, and the only option that’s left for the country to ensure accessibility and affordability to quality healthcare is development of new tools (Trynosky, 2014).
References
González, P. (2004). On a policy of transferring public patients to private practice. Health Economics , 14 (5), 513-527. doi:10.1002/hec.946
Niles, N. (2015). History of the U.S. Healthcare System. In Basics of the U.S. Healthcare System. Burlington, Mass: Jones & Barlett Learning
The Lancet. (2011). Medical errors in the USA: human or systemic? The Lancet , 377 (9774), 1289. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(11)60520-5
Trynosky, S. K. (2014). Beyond the Iron Triangle: Implications for the Veterans Health Administration in an Uncertain Policy Environment. doi:10.21236/ada614090
